FALL RIVER — The house at 189 5th St. is one of the success stories.
It was listed on the city’s abandoned properties register toward the end of 2015. It wasn’t long before a group of squatters moved in.
“About a year ago, the people staying there had a party and ordered a pizza delivery,” said city Inspectional Services Director Glenn Hathaway. “They took the pizza and beat the hell out of the driver so they didn’t have to pay him.”
It took some time, but that property eventually found a new owner.
“It’s being remodeled right now and I believe it is occupied,” said Hathaway.
Under city law, properties that are vacant longer than 45 days get placed on the abandoned houses register. The numbers have consistently fluctuated in recent years, but Hathaway and his staff say things have started to improve. Due to a loss of some records, the city’s Office of Code Enforcement could only provide numbers from the last three fiscal years, but the register has shrunk from 392 properties to just 242 over that time.
The highest numbers, Hathaway said, were in the years following the 2008 recession, but the high cost of living in Greater Boston has helped bring new interest to Fall River properties. As Minimum Housing Director Faust Fiore explained, commuters are willing to put up with longer commutes if it means paying less in rent. Unlike some of the state’s other cities, Fall River benefits from being close to two employment hubs: Boston and Providence.
“There are investors, both local and from out of town, that are coming in. They’re telling me that they know rent is on the rise in Fall River,” said Fiore. “They tell me they’ve had their eye on Fall River. For a while it was the next place. Now it is the place.”
Fiore points to the city’s Corky Row historic district as one such example. Several years ago, he said it was home to one of the largest concentrations of vacant and abandoned properties. It was also listed in a 2016 housing study by UMass Dartmouth as being Fall River’s most blighted neighborhood. Now Fiore estimates that six of those once problematic buildings are being simultaneously renovated by different investors.
Many of the houses on the registry can be traced back to difficulties from the recession, Hathaway explained, while others became abandoned when the accumulating costs of needed repairs became too much for landlords. There are also many that became abandoned after the original owner died and there were no heirs to take over the property or the heirs didn’t want to be involved.
What makes it difficult to gauge the city’s fight against urban decay is the frequency with which the numbers change. Newly vacated or abandoned properties are continuously being called in to city officials. The list also changes when properties are renovated and new tenants move in, meaning the addresses get removed from the list.
One way to track the trend is through the fees property owners have to pay when their house is added to the city’s register. Fees start at a rate of $500 and then increase to $3,000 when the property has been vacant for three years or more.
However, because the fees continue to grow the longer a property stays abandoned, it’s also possible for the city to collect more in fee revenue despite having fewer neglected houses than the year before.
The total amount of registration fees collected in fiscal 2015 was $130,500, which dropped to $114,200 the next year, then climbed up to $150,000 in fiscal 2017. The highest recent total was collected last year with $219,191. If this year’s levels remain stable, the city will likely collect less money in fiscal 2019. With only five months left in the current fiscal year, only $73,755 has been collected so far.
Revenues from these fees were originally intended to be used to pay for building inspection costs, but are now ending up in the city’s general fund and being appropriated in other city departments.
Further straining resources is the fact that the city is often held financially responsible for issues that happen at these properties because tenants and owners refuse to pay. Sometimes the expense can be as simple as trash removal. Other times it can be the cost of demolishing one of the buildings.
A recent demolition of a house on Tecumseh Street cost the city $22,000. Some have cost as much as $65,000. On average, Fiore said there are roughly five or six properties throughout the city that have gone past the point of being fixed and need to be torn down.